What Is Web Scraping? How Does It Work?

Web scraping is the practice of obtaining contacts, prices, product descriptions, and other details from web pages, APIs, and mobile apps with the help of bots. It enables nefarious actors to compose large databases of valuable information with modest expenses and within a short time period.

The information from web scrapers can be used in many different ways. Some companies need it for market research or for finding out about their competitors’ activities. Others leverage it to generate leads and monetize the collection of contacts that don’t belong to them. Unfortunately, worse scenarios are possible too. People who scrape the information can use it to send out phishing links or other types of scam offer on behalf of honest companies. Alternatively, they might leak data online for free or sell it on the darknet.

To get the contents of third-party sites, one can employ a web scraper. It’s a bot that pretends to be a normal browser or a well-intentioned crawler from a social network or search engine. It accesses web pages or mobile apps and extracts the information from them. It can bring you all the data from the target source or only the details that meet your requirements. Bot owners can fine-tune their settings before launching them. For instance, they can ask bots to extract only prices or e-mail addresses from the source. Once the information is scraped, the bot will place it in a database accessible only to the person who launched it.

The biggest issue with this technique is that it’s not ethical and legitimate. At the same time, it’s very widespread. It is possible but very challenging to punish the authors of the attack after it took place. Instead, it would be wiser to prevent scrapers proactively.

In this text, we’ll explain to you the essence of web scraping in greater detail and outline its potential negative consequences. You’ll get to know which measures can protect you against web scrapers – and which ones have become outdated and inefficient. Plus, we’ll inform you about the potential and advantages of our BotBye! solution that can help you get rid of scrapers once and forever.

Potential Negative Consequences of Web Scraping

The usage of web scrapers can provoke the following negative aftermaths for businesses:

• Third parties can steal your content and use it for commercial purposes without your permission
• Your competitors can scrape your clients’ emails to send out their offers
• Your competitors will get to know your prices and will sell their products cheaper
• The performance of your web pages and mobile apps will decrease
• Web scrapers will drain your team’s resources and slow down your business development

Below, we’ll have a closer look at each issue separately.

Content Theft

Entrepreneurs who want their businesses to remain successful in the long run never plagiarize content. They invest funds into generating unique and high-quality texts, photos, and videos. They hire or outsource copywriters, designers, cameramen, and other professionals. They realize that top-notch content serves at least two purposes:

• Attracts consumers and makes them curious about the company’s products
• Improves the organization’s position in the search engine results

To tick the second box, it’s necessary to make systematic SEO efforts – such as by inserting keywords in texts and adding meta attributes to pictures. Honest companies hire SEO specialists to perform this task.

By sending a web scraper, a third party can copy all the content from a site that doesn’t belong to them. Then, they paste this content to their web pages – either without modifying it at all or after introducing slight modifications. There are many tools online that can rephrase the text to make it unique or tweak the picture so that it differs from the original source. These modifications can be done cheaply and quickly. However, the quality of the resulting text and visuals can be substandard – while their original versions were laboriously optimized. That’s why unscrupulous individuals prefer to post the originals without changing anything in them.

Search engines lower the rankings of sites that publish duplicate content. Nevertheless, malicious actors who resort to web scraping might benefit from stealing texts and visuals in the short term – and that’s why they do it.

The only way to prevent content theft is to deploy software solutions that combat scrapers. The most persistent hackers can try to steal your content manually. But why should they bother to do it? There are so many poorly protected web pages on the Internet that they can attack with the help of automated tools…

Email Scraping This technique suggests that bots collect email addresses from sites, forums, or social networks. The emails belong to people who are interested in something particular – such as a brand or a type of service.

Imagine your company sells sports shoes. A competitor can extract your customer emails to send out attractive offers, such as a personalized discount for a new collection. Emails remain an efficient sales channel if you know how to use them properly. Email scraping can deprive you of clients and a part of your income. And it’s not the worst scenario!

Malicious actors can pretend to be you and send out phishing emails on your behalf. When the recipients click the link in the message, they will be required to type in their payment credentials or other personal data. As soon as they do it, hackers will get hold of their private details and will be able to use them at their own discretion.

It’s also possible that nefarious actors can send out spam either on your behalf or by simply using your audience’s email addresses.

To prevent email scraping, it would be wise to keep your customers’ contact details in a protected database. They shouldn’t be easily accessible right from your web pages.

Price Scraping

Efficient pricing models are a vital competitive edge for each business. That’s why organizations want to know how much their competitors charge for their goods and services.

Web scrapers often come into play when:

• A site contains hundreds or thousands of price tags, so it’s tricky to check them manually
• The prices are dynamic – for instance, they can change every day or several times per day
• To get to know the prices, the user needs to confirm their intentions and complete some actions

Plane tickets or concert tickets can serve as an example of products whose prices are highly dynamic. A web scraper can investigate their fluctuations with great precision. Then, a competitor company can build a pricing model that will outperform yours. It means it will offer slightly more lucrative discounts – which will insignificantly reduce your competitor’s income but will let them poach your audience.

Website developers try to make the lives of web scrapers more difficult by introducing obstacles to them. For instance, to access the prices of apartments in a new building you might need to select an apartment by parameters first. It can be a challenge for the simplest bots – but their more advanced counterparts can cope with this task.

Website Performance Issues

Web scrapers can reduce your site’s performance in at least three ways:

• Web scraping attacks can account for over 50% of your website’s traffic. As a result, your web pages begin to load slower for normal users. This makes people suspicious. No one enjoys waiting, so your clients might leave your site and switch to your competitors. There is no guarantee they will ever come back.
• When scraping reaches its peak, selected pages or tools on your site might become temporarily inaccessible. Again, people might leave you and place their orders elsewhere.
• Most likely, you analyze the behavior of your website users to make data-driven decisions. For instance, you find out at what time of the day people tend to check a particular catalog page. However, how can you tell a genuine customer from a web scraper? Bots impair your analytics and prevent you from acting smartly.

With mobile apps and APIs, the situation is identical.

Web Scrapers Steal Your Employees’ Time

Web scraping attacks can cost you a pretty penny. Imagine that some of the negative consequences that we mentioned above indeed took place. For instance, your competitors have stolen your prices and attract customers with discounts. To bring clients back, you should ask your sales department to review their strategies and tactics. This will take time and effort. Maybe, your sales team won’t be able to come up with new efficient tactics at the first attempt. You’ll fail to receive a part of your well-deserved income.

Alternatively, let’s imagine that your website often goes down because of web scraping. Your IT team will need to find a way to fix this issue. Calculate how many hours it will take them and multiply this number by the hourly cost of their work. Besides, while your IT staffers are busy with web scrapers, they could have been completing higher-priority tasks.

It’s unlikely that only one web scraper targets your site only once. Most likely, the attacks will be varied and repetitive. To fix their aftermaths, your employees will have to complete the same actions over and over, which would be boring and tiresome. They might feel demotivated and decide to leave you.

Web Scraping vs. Web Crawling

While web scraping attacks are definitely a negative phenomenon, the automated process of collecting data from third-party sites is not always undesirable. If it’s legit and helpful, it’s called web crawling. Technically, it’s synonymous with scraping – the only difference lies in the positive or negative evaluation.

Here are three examples of the situations where web crawling comes in handy:

• Search engines. Crawlers discover and index web pages.
• RSS and Atom feeds. Bots find information from various sources to shape the news feed.
• Social networks. The Facebook crawler enables people to share your content on this social network. Other similar bots perform the same task for other platforms.

As a website owner, you can prevent the Facebook crawler from visiting your pages. But then, you’ll miss the chance to get free organic promotions on the platform. Similarly, you can block the Google crawler – and your pages won’t be indexed in the most popular search engine.

To prohibit web scraping, you can place the stop sign for bots in your website’s robots.txt file. However, this measure won’t protect you from illegal web scrapers. Good and obedient bots will read your message and leave your pages. Meanwhile, the solutions developed by malicious actors will ignore your request and will obtain any data they fancy.

By the way, we have a dedicated article on bot detection. Feel free to check it to get more information on the matter!

Quick Guide on Web Scrapers

If you want to build a web scraper yourself, you might cope with this task even if your technical expertise is not too extensive. There are dozens of comprehensive tutorials online. If you follow them, you’ll be able to get the information from any websites and mobile apps that you need. Otherwise, you can order this tool from a professional developer. Please mind that we don’t encourage you to do so! We only inform you about how things work. Our goal is to help you understand how hackers operate and better protect yourself from them.

Typically, malicious actors stick to this scheme:

1. Write the script for the bot. Python, Java, Ruby, and Perl are the most common languages for this purpose. To make life easier, they can resort to dedicated programming software that automates most tasks.

2. When the scraper is ready, the developer takes measures to disguise it. For instance, they can try to make it look like a well-intentioned web crawler. Alternatively, they can pass it off as a headless browser – that is, the one that lacks a graphic user interface.

3. The hacker fine-tunes the bot’s settings. They define its targets and “explain” to the bot which information to extract.

4. The bot begins to work.

5. After the bot has collected the information, it will add it to the database. Then, the malicious actors will be able to do anything they wish with this data, such as resell it or analyze it and plan its future usage.

Thousands of hackers can follow this simple scheme. However, the resulting bots can be very different from each other – that’s why it can be tricky to detect and confront them.

Growing Sophistication of Web Scrapers

We’ve already voiced the idea that scraping technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Now, let’s have a look at a noteworthy example.

As said above, the Facebook crawler is a legitimate and helpful tool. Most website owners deliberately allow it to access their pages. When someone wants to share the content from this website on FB, this social network will correctly display the thumbnail image, page title, and meta description of the chosen piece of content.

Hackers discovered a vulnerability in the FB’s API. They managed to use the Facebook crawler for their nefarious purposes, bombarding the visited web pages with too many requests. At first sight, it was impossible to notice any suspicious traits in the bot’s behavior. Only skilled professionals with profound technical expertise could discover the problem.

After the team of this social network was informed about the issue, they fixed it promptly. Now, the Facebook crawler doesn’t act like a malicious web scraper anymore.

However, hackers are extremely inventive and creative. They keep continuously looking for new tools and techniques. It’s vital to remain on the alert permanently to prevent potential damage.

Legality of Web Scraping

The legality of web scraping is a tricky issue. On the one hand, it’s not a legal practice in many territories. On the other hand, it’s not always possible to detect and punish people who violate the law.

Even though we say in this article that web scrapers “steal” data, they actually don't do it. The information is openly available online and bots only extract it. If you take the matter to court, it might be challenging to prove the guilt of the person who launched the web scraper.

Content Items That Are the Most Prone to Web Scraping

According to statistics, web scraping attacks most frequently target the following types of content:

• Prices
• Coupons, discounts, and special offers
• Product cards
• Consumer reviews
• Classified ads
• Blog posts and news articles

If you notice suspicious activities on the pages that feature these content items, web scrapers might be to blame. Check whether users who don’t make purchases spend a lot of time on these pages – they might be bots.

Inefficient Web Scraping Prevention Methods

To combat web scraping, businesses try to use CAPTCHAs and web application firewalls. Plus, they explicitly prohibit the use of web scrapers in their terms and conditions. Unfortunately, none of these methods can boast high efficiency – let’s have a look at the reasons.

CAPTCHAs

When the Internet was in its infancy, CAPTCHAs used to be efficient against bots. Today, it’s not the case anymore:

• Bots are becoming increasingly smarter. Advanced solutions can cope with CAPTCHAs just as efficiently as humans.
• Human users from developing countries eagerly solve CAPTCHAs manually in exchange for a ridiculously small financial reward. They work in groups known as CAPTCHA farms.

If you put the most difficult CAPTCHA on your site, the simplest and cheapest bots might fail to solve it. Thereby, you’ll cut off at least some part of the attackers. On the flip side, you might lose genuine customers too. Imagine a client fails to solve your CAPTCHA – such a situation is called “getting a false positive”. They will get frustrated and will leave your site without placing an order.

We don’t mean to say that CAPTCHAs have become entirely obsolete. They can be helpful if you use them in conjunction with dedicated solutions that prevent web scrapers.

Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)

Previously, WAFs provided robust protection against IP-related threats. Unfortunately, firewalls fail to keep up with technological progress. They can’t ward off modern sophisticated threats, such as web scrapers. The latter can juggle IP addresses effortlessly, that’s why WAF’s detection techniques are useless against them.

Besides, advanced bots smoothly mimic human behavior. A firewall can hardly tell a malicious bot from a well-intentioned person.

Terms and Conditions

You can explicitly prohibit the use of web scrapers in the terms and conditions of your website. If someone violates this rule, you can take them to court. There have been legal precedents in the EU where companies were found guilty of web scraping.

However, multiple questions arise:

• How will you detect who stole your information? Imagine your competitor asked a third party to send web scrapers to your site. Will you be able to identify the bot creator and prove the connection between the two actors?
• How much funds will you need to spend on taking this person or company to court? Will the game be worth the candle?
• Will you be able to prove that the person or company who sent web scrapers to your site is guilty? The answer can depend on the national and international laws. You’ll need to investigate them thoroughly before taking action.

Punishing those who violate your terms and conditions can take too much time and effort. It’s always a good idea to declare your policies in the document. But it won’t grant you 100% protection against web scrapers.

Try BotBye! for Efficient Protection Against Web Scrapers

Our team built the efficient and affordable BotBye! solution to offer robust protection against web scrapers to our clients. Our product comes in handy for companies from many different industries, be it finance, i-gaming, travel, e-commerce, or anything else. After deploying it, you’ll enjoy 100% control over the information that you share online.

BotBye! can protect the data from your websites, mobile apps, and APIs against the following types of threats:

• Account takeover
• Scraping
• Credential stuffing
• Fake account creation

You can find informative articles on our website where we explain in detail the essence of each of these phenomena.

It will be easy for you to deploy BotBye! on any infrastructure, be it Node.js, Java, Kotlin, and so on. Our product is available in two versions, on-premise or cloud. BotBye! is lightweight and perfectly compatible with most web technologies. The installation takes only a few minutes. The documentation is comprehensive and the integration will be smooth both on the server side and the client side.

BotBye! will be analyzing request statistics to your API in real-time. The reports that it will generate for you will enable you to make data-driven decisions. Hopefully, our product will allow you to avoid financial and reputational losses. Your web pages and apps will boast the maximum uptime and your business will be developing uninterruptedly.

Final Thoughts

During web scraping attacks, bots launched by malicious actors can collect data from your web pages, APIs, and apps. It’s not an entirely legit method — but it’s very difficult to detect and punish its orchestrators. Thanks to using it, your competitors might steal your clients and you might lose a part of your income. Your website or app might fail to perform properly or become temporarily unavailable. Your team might need to get distracted from high-priority tasks to fix the consequences of the attack.

It would be much wiser to protect yourself from web scraping proactively. Such old-school methods as CAPTCHAs or web application firewalls are inefficient against modern threats. If you prohibit scraping in your terms and conditions, honest actors will obey this rule — but dishonest ones won’t. The best way out is to deploy a dedicated anti-scraping solution, such as our BotBye!.

Feel free to try BotBye! right now! You’ll appreciate its efficiency, and our team is always ready to answer all of your questions.